Teaching and Learning

The child is at the center of the educational process at the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan.

• All learning begins from the child, originating in the child's prior experiences, understandings, and questions and proceeding outward, linking up with new, challenging experiences.

• All learning is driven by the child's natural curiosity, by the need to make meaning out of daily experiences in his or her physical and social environment. Observing what happens, the child reflects on it, asks questions, and seeks to formulate answers.

• All learning culminates in the child's increasing competence to understand what he or she only vaguely understood before, and to do what he or she could almost, but not quite, do before.

Each child is unique in personality, temperament, learning style, background, and interests. While all children go through the same steps of the learning process, they do not do so in the same way or at the same time. One of the teacher's tasks is to recognize and provide for each child's individuality, while at the same time maximizing the opportunities children have for social learning from each other. 

Each child is a whole person, with mind, heart, spirit, and hands. To educate the whole child, we strive to devise learning experiences that touch on all of these domains. In addition, because the domains are interrelated, we help children make connections across domains and subject-matter disciplines.